Pneumatic tires, including tubeless pneumatic tires, have for many years been used on vehicles, particularly on automobiles and trucks.
Such tires commonly rely on air-impermeable inner liners to retain the air required to give them their necessary torus configuration. In the past, inner liners made from butyl rubber, i.e., a copolymer of isobutylene and isoprene, have been used by the industry in view of the fact that vulcanizates of such rubber have good tensile strength and abrasion resistance, display excellent impermeability to air, and have a service temperature range of from about -55.degree. to about +204.degree. C.
While the above properties are all useful in providing the characteristics necessary for the successful performance of tires, such inner liners have certain inherent drawbacks which it would be of advantage to avoid. Butyl rubber inner liners, for example, must first be formed and thereafter fastened to the surface constituting the inside of a tire's carcass, an operation involving manufacturing and processing procedures entailing considerable cost.
One way in which the processing costs described could be minimized would be to substitute for the butyl rubber liners of the type described, liners comprising air-impermeable coatings utilizing, for example, the bispropynone-based polymer systems systems described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,059,666. However, while some of the polymers there disclosed display excellent air-impermeability and could simply be coated on the tires' interior surfaces, the bisopropynones on which the polymer systems are based are relatively costly materials which would make such coatings undesirably expensive, adding correspondingly excessive costs to the tire's manufacture. In addition, the mechanical properties of the materials there taught are inferior to the physical properties of the materials disclosed herein.